One Mailbox for Many Messages
Regional telephone giant SBC Communications Inc. today will offer customers who buy bundled services the option to consolidate and manage their e-mail, voicemail and faxes in a single spot.
The unified messaging program creates a mailbox that can be accessed from land-line or cellular phones or over the Internet and is able to translate text into voice and vice-versa.
SBC’s product is similar to a program launched last week in the Northeast by Verizon Communications Inc., which plans to bring it to California by the end of this year. That product offers such features as pop-up messaging, which can notify a customer at work about an important message on the home phone.
Such unified communications is seen as a key to helping telecom firms retain customers and add revenue from new sources.
“What’s going on here is not just another bundled service,” said William Stofega, a senior analyst at International Data Corp., a marketing and research firm in Framingham, Mass. “It’s connecting the dots in the services already in the bundle.”
For SBC, the main selling point is one mailbox for all voice, e-mail and fax messages.
“Imagine just one account where all e-mail and voicemail went,” said Steve Hilton, an analyst at Yankee Group, a Boston-based telecom research firm. “If you’re on the road and have only your cellphone, you can tap into your account and listen as your e-mail is transformed into voice.”
Executives at SBC, California’s dominant local phone company, said the new program would help attract new customers, keep existing ones and give it a leg up on any competitors still testing unified communications.
Bundles, in which customers choose to purchase multiple services such as local calling as well as long-distance from a single provider, “were just the first step,” said Donna Harrison, SBC’s vice president for product management. “We’re now delivering on the promise of bundles to make the services work together in a whole new way.”
The program is available only to SBC local phone customers in California and 12 other states where SBC dominates. Those using 58% of SBC’s 54 million residential and small-business lines also take at least one other service in a bundle.
For those with SBC’s all-distance local and unlimited long-distance calling plan, the cost of replacing voicemail with unified communications is $1 more on the monthly phone bill, raising it to $49.95 in California. For those with the all-distance plan who want to add their Cingular Wireless cellphones to the single mailbox, the cost rises by $3 a month.
Customers with only SBC local service or with local and per-minute long-distance would pay an additional $8.95 for unified communications. If they have a Cingular cellphone, it would cost $10.95 for integrated message service. The program doesn’t support any other cellphone.
“There has been a lot of work behind the scenes to make this all work,” Harrison said. “We think that people will be excited about it.”
Unified messaging, or unified communications, has been tried before but hasn’t attracted much interest. IDC’s Stofega said that was partly because of technical problems and because people weren’t ready for it. “People are more comfortable with mobility now and getting messages from different devices,” he said. “The whole population has experience now with e-mail and voicemail and cellphones, and they had to experience all those things and get used to them to be ready for this.”
About 11% of small and mid-size businesses with bundled services are using some form of unified communications, according to a recent Yankee Group report.
“Clearly,” said Yankee Group’s Hilton, “this is where folks are going.”
